


I Knew You'd be Trouble

by panem_et_circenses



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M, First Meetings, Multiple Perspectives, Soul Mate AU, soul marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-15
Updated: 2016-02-15
Packaged: 2018-05-20 19:22:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6021961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/panem_et_circenses/pseuds/panem_et_circenses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A soul-bond AU where the first words that your soul mate will say to you are marked on your skin in their own handwriting.</p><p>Wherein Bellamy is a giant sap and has spent his entire life planning the first words he'll say to his soul mate and practicing his penmanship so her marks will be perfect and Clarke sort of forgot that it was a thing entirely and never quite learned to hold her tongue.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Clarke

**Author's Note:**

> I've never written a fic before, but I'm always a sucker for any sort of Soul Mate AU and this idea has been niggling at my brain for ages. Thanks for giving it a shot!

Clarke was six the day that she found out what the lazy, looping script along her ribs meant. It had been there since the day she was born, a birth mark that she found herself unconsciously running her fingers over for comfort before she could even read the words “I love you for all that you are, all that you have been, and all that you are yet to be.”

The summer that Clarke was six was the year she started to take swim lessons. The first time she showed up in a two-piece bathing suit, the script on full display, the rest of the kids in her swim class fixated on the script and asked so many questions that Clarke couldn’t answer. Even the instructor was taken aback by it. When her mother picked her up that day, they had what Clarke will forever remember as “the talk.”

Soul mates.

A rare phenomenon where the universe decides that two people are perfect for each other and shows it by inscribing the first words the soul mate will say to you somewhere on your skin in their own handwriting.

Clarke, they said, was one of the lucky ones.

At nine, when she finally wrapped her mind around some form of a concept of what the words on her ribs meant, she _believed_ that being part of a soul bond meant she was lucky. With first words like hers, this soul mate was going to be incredible. At fifteen, when all of her friends started dating and no one in town would so much as look at her because of the mark, she felt less than lucky - the only one of her friends who hadn't been kissed, the only one without a date to homecoming - but it didn’t stop her from showing off the mark whenever she could. High school was a sea of crop tops and cut out dresses that left at least some part of the stunning script exposed in every single photo she showed up in in the yearbook. (It was partly because she wanted to prove that she wasn't a social pariah by choice and partly because, despite the downsides of the whole soul mate thing, she still loved everything about the mark.)

By twenty-five, the mark was no longer at the forefront of her mind. Anything related to soul mates had been pushed aside; more time, more energy, more brain power taken up by internships and med school classes. So much effort went into her daily tasks that she no longer had anything left to spare for fretting over her soul mate.

That's probably why the word “surprised” doesn’t entirely cover the way she feels when she meets him.

It’s a Tuesday, edging close to midnight, when she stomps into the dingy boxing club downtown. Raven’s fight was supposed to end hours ago and she still hasn't heard from her. Raven is never late. At this point, Clarke’s only conclusion is that Raven is lying on the floor around here unconscious while the rest of these Neanderthals just step over her prone body, content to do something nefarious like shoot up steroids or poison each others' protein powder while her friend dies a slow and painful death.

“Raven?” She calls through the gym. The lighting is dim and Clarke has to focus squarely on the ground to make sure she doesn’t trip over any of the equipment left lying on the floor or slip in any sweat puddles. “Raven!” She's shouting loud enough that her voice echoes back to her off the concrete walls. If Raven is here, she must have heard her.

A hand falls on her shoulder and Clarke jumps, pushing the hand away and whirling around, hissing, “You got some kind of problem, asshole?”

The guy standing in front of her now looks like she’s just punched him. His mouth is hanging open and it looks like some of his hair has fallen into his eyes in the minor scuffle, but he does nothing to push it out of the way - probably because his hand is still frozen in the air where Clarke’s shoulder was just a moment ago. He stares at her for what feels like hours and, not one to back away from a challenge, no matter how strange, she stares right back. It goes on long enough that she has time to attempt (and fail) to count the constellations of freckles that dance across his face. Twice.

Finally, he snaps his jaw shut and drops his arm to his side. His mouth twists together into an angry pout before he huffs out a breath and all but seethes: “I love you for all that you are, all that you have been, and all that you are yet to be.”

Clarke’s stomach drops at hearing those words because _holy shit_. She’s dreamed about this moment for years. His voice is deep and rich and sends her into this pleasant full-body shiver. It’s almost enough that she can ignore that vicious, angry tone. Almost. She's imagined hearing those words for so long. For a long time she dreamt about them coming from the mouth of someone she knew in passing but had never really spoken to - a boy from Chemistry class or an actor from a movie. There was a time where she started to think that they might come from another woman. She's dreamt about them being said breathlessly in that magic moment where she and her soul mate were supposed to fall in love. She's dreamt about them being said reverently, punctuated with a kiss to sweep her off her feet. She's imagined it a lot of ways. 

Never, in any of her wildest imaginings, did she ever think those words could be laced with such blatant anger.

When her heart rate finally returns to normal, Clarke smacks a hand over her mouth, recalling the first thing that she said to him. “Oh, shit, really?” She asks sheepishly, feeling a blush crawl over her cheeks and oh boy does that anger seem to make a whole lot more sense now.

The guy in front of her – her soul mate – cocks an eyebrow and lifts up one side of the hem of his shirt. Sure enough, right there above his hip bone in her own sloppy scrawl are the words “You got some kind of problem, asshole?”

She laughs until her stomach hurts and then laughs a bit more, because the alternative is being horrified that she’s saddled this guy with that as a permanent mark on his body for his entire life. “At least you were well-prepared for me, huh?”

He tries to look annoyed again, but it loses all of its malice when Clarke realizes that this giant sap must have practiced the first words he would say to her, picked out something that he liked and stuck to it even in the face of her rude introduction. Instead, he just looks adorable as he says, “That’s one way to look at it.”


	2. Bellamy

When you’re the older half of a soul mate pair, the mark doesn’t appear on your body until your soul mate is born. For Bellamy Blake, it was the middle of the night in the fall of the year he turned five. It didn’t exactly hurt, it was just this full-body warmth and a tingling sensation that spread across the skin low on his stomach where the mark appeared.

He ran into his mother’s bedroom in the middle of the night and showed her the new black lines scratched along his skin and she just blinked at them a few times before gasping. “Bell, honey, this is going to be our secret, okay? You can’t go around showing that to people.” Because what mother wants their child running around and showing off the profanity that’s inked on his skin forever?

It’s Miller of all people who winds up talking to him about it. It’s high school and his mom is sick, so sick. They’re trying their best to make ends meet but between her being out of work for treatments and the medical bills piling up, it’s getting harder every day. Once in a while, Miller drags him and Octavia home from school on a day where Bellamy’s not working, shoves a full plate of food in front of them to make sure that they’re eating and sends Bellamy to the spare bedroom to get some sleep while he helps Octavia with her homework.

It’s one of those days. Bellamy is just getting out of Miller’s shower with a belly full of leftover Lo Mein, grateful for the long stretch of hot water, when Miller pokes his head in the door with a history question that he and Octavia are both stuck on. Bellamy’s got the towel tied around his waist, and it’s been so long since he’s thought about it that he forgets to be self-conscious of the words on his hip, the tops of which are peeking out above the terry cloth.  
Miller pauses mid-question and cocks his head. “Did you get a tattoo without telling me? You know I’ve been talking about getting a tattoo for ages, man!”

Bellamy blinks and follows Miller’s eye-line to the mark, then jumps. “Not exactly.” He shrugs, aiming for cool and probably missing by a mile. “It’s been there since I was a kid.”

It takes a moment before Miller’s eyes go wide. “You’ve got a soul mark? Come on, we’ve been friends for years. I can’t believe you never told me about this. What does it say?” 

Bellamy reaches up to scratch at the side of his neck. Soul marks. He’s heard of them, sort of vaguely and mostly in passing. Is that what the mark is? He never really thought about it. “It says ‘you got some kind of problem, asshole?’”

It takes ten minutes for Miller to stop laughing and when he does he has to wipe tears out of his eyes.

Miller calmly explains the ins and outs and soul mate bonds to Bellamy that evening. He heard the whole ordeal that this cousin went through a few years back – getting her mark at 4 years old, meeting her soul mate in high school, how they’ve been disgustingly in love since pretty much that day. Bellamy is at first equal parts horrified that _those_ are the first words his soul mate will say to him and thrilled that he gets to have a soul mate. 

It takes a year for him to find some positives within the mark. He comes to realize that his soul mate must be fierce, independent and capable of handling herself. It’s a good thing, he knows, because that means that she’ll be able to handle him as well. 

When his mom finally succumbs to the cancer senior year of high school, he’s already eighteen. It’s a small bright spot that at least he’s a legal adult when it happens, but it’s still a hell of a fight to prove that he’s fit to take legal custody over Octavia and then another fight and a half to keep the both of them afloat.

Through all the weariness, the sleeplessness and overnight shifts, he finds himself taking comfort in the mark on his hip. When he’s dealing with particularly prickly customers, he finds his hand falling over the mark without his consent. When he gets home at 6 am and _still_ can’t sleep because he needs to make sure that Octavia is up for school, has lunch to bring in, has a ride, he stares at the sloppy, jagged letters. He likes to think that in those moments he’s borrowing strength from his soul mate. 

It’s because he relies so heavily on his mark that he devises his plan. He hasn’t _said_ his first words to his soul mate yet, so he can make them anything he wants. He gets to decide the mark that he leaves on her skin and he wants it to be good. If she’s going through anything like what he is, he wants to make sure that she knows she can draw on his strength, too. Wants her to know that she’s loved, even now before he’s met her.

He makes a list of all the quotes he’s found over the years that he’s liked. It begins with quotes from Plato’s Symposium – Aristotle’s entire monologue winds up on the list in chunked quotes, though his favorite is “Love is composed of a single soul inhabiting two bodies.” That’s how he first rationalized soul mates after his conversation with Miller. There are quotes of strength from Homer’s Odyssey and Epicurus’ famous quote about courage in the face of adversity.

It takes him hours to write this list – spread over weeks. From it, he takes away two things. First, none of these are good enough for his soul mate. They’re famous words – ones he could have easily pulled off a quick Google search if he wanted to. He loves these quotes, but none of them are things that he would say. Second, he seriously needs to work on his handwriting.

He starts a new list, one that’s a little more personal. It takes him months to write this one, each quote a little neater than the last as he concentrates more on his penmanship. 

Octavia finds the list one day, late in her own senior year of high school, where he left it on the bathroom sink after a particularly inspiring moment mid-shower that morning. The list now takes up almost an entire notebook, which she brings out into the living room with a smirk, waving it around with a question in her eyes but silence on her lips.

It’s Miller, because of course it is – who else would bear witness to his most humiliating soul mate moments? – that grabs the notebook from Octavia and starts flipping viciously through the pages. “Is this what I think it is? Wait don’t even tell me. I don’t think I want to know.”

“It’s a whole book of Bell’s love quotes.” Octavia teases, hopping across the small room to ruffle his hair into an even worse mess. “Look how _loopy_ you’re writing. You’ve been practicing for her, haven’t you?”

By the heat he feels in his cheeks, he imagines he’s bright red, but at least no one comments on his blush. “Maybe.” Is all he says.

Miller throws the book behind his head where it thunks against the wall and slides down to the floor. “Have you seen your mark lately, man? The first time you meet this girl she’s going to swear at you! Even if you really buy into all this destined-in-the-stars crap about soul mates, how can you spend what is clearly years of your life pining over this girl and perfecting whatever her mark is when you’ve got that shit on your body for the next 60 to 70 years?”

“Watch it!” Bellamy growls, feeling intensely protective of not only the girl he hasn’t met, but the whole concept of a soul bond in general. “It might not be today or tomorrow or next week, but one day...” He drops off because anything that’s on the tip of his tongue will just encourage the both of them to tease him more. “One day she’ll be around and if you want to keep me around, you’re going to have to get used to her, too.”

They both gape at him for a moment before Octavia breaks into giggles. “My brother, the super soul mate. I really shouldn’t be surprised.” She ruffles his hair again one more time. “If she doesn’t love you at least as much as you love her, I reserve the right to be a total bitch until she gets the picture and realizes how lucky she is.”

 

The day he meets her, when she slaps his hand away and spits those words at him with venom dripping from her tone, he almost loses it. It’s nearing midnight and he’s been working since 8 am because Al called in sick. He’s still got a paper to finish when he gets home and the last thing he wants to deal with is some chick running through the gym shouting about and yelling at him when he tries to help.

He almost doesn’t even catch himself before he says something equally mean right back at her. He wants to. He really does. Years of extrapolating positive personality traits from one sentence didn’t exactly prepare him for this moment. So he gapes a little and tries to come up with a word that accurately describes the color of her eyes because “blue” just sounds so lame.

Finally, when he’s caught his breath and calmed down he tells her, albeit through slightly clenched teeth, “I love you for all that you are, all that you have been, and all that you are yet to be.”

He reaction is priceless and all kinds of sweet - her concern and horror, the decision to choose to find it funny instead of terrible. “At least you were well-prepared for me, huh?”

It’s a toss up as to whether she’s talking about the quote being a good representation of her as a person or whether she’s teasing him for prepping himself for this meeting, so he just says, “That’s one way to look at it.”

“You got a name?” She asks, and her eyes seem to drift back to his hip where her words lay inked on his skin. He’s a little jealous in the moment, wants to know where he can find his mark on her skin – and God if it doesn’t give him a thrill knowing that somewhere on her skin she’s marked just for him.

“Bellamy.” He says, voice sounding a bit gruffer than it did just a few seconds ago. “Bellamy Blake.”

“Bellamy.” She nods and repeats it a few times. He can’t help but love the way it sounds on her tongue. “I’m Clarke, Clarke Griffin, and if I’m being honest here, Clarke Blake sounds like possibly the worst name ever, so before you get your hopes up I just want you know that I won’t be taking your name without putting up at least a solid fight.”

It doesn’t surprise him in the least. Maybe the mark really did leave him well-prepared for a soul mate like Clarke Griffin. He hopes that what he’s just chosen as his own mark for her hasn’t left her anticipating that he’ll go down without a fight either. 

“We can argue about it when the time comes.” (And if way that he now gets to talk about their upcoming wedding as an eventuality leaves his chest feeling a little warmer, no one needs to know.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Both of these perspectives were totally supposed to be the same length. Apparently Bellamy just got away from me a little bit! Thanks to the lovely commenter who got me thinking about just how ridiculous Bellamy really would've been growing up with that mark as one half of a soul bond!


End file.
